All activities can be classified into primary and secondary activities. For primary activities the cost object that the activities are performed for (products, services, customers) can be directly identified. Secondary activities are not directly linked to the cost object (i.e. services of the HR department cannot be traced to a specific product or customer). Therefore, secondary activity costs are assigned to the primary activities they enable to be performed, i.e. HR costs are allocated to production and sales activities which are primary. (Atkinson et al. 2012).